Open Season (23 page)

By the faint blue light from the moon, he saw the shadow of a lamp on a table in the hall; he bent down, turned it on, and looked at his wristwatch.

“Dad?”

The voice made him jump and spin around. He hadn't known which room the children were sleeping in. When he entered the bedroom, he saw Sheridan sitting upright on the bed, her fingers wrapped tightly around the covers.

“Honey,” Joe said as he sat down on the bed, “it's three-thirty in the morning. Why aren't you sleeping?”

He couldn't see her well in the dark. She looked like a tangle of blond hair and thin limbs. He stroked her hair and eased her back to her pillow.

“I can't sleep,” Sheridan said, her voice hoarse.

“Is it the new house?” he asked. “Sleeping in a new bed?”

She didn't answer, but he had the feeling that she wanted to say something. Tell him something. He petted her hair and shoulder to calm her. Something was wrong. He heard her sniff and realized that she had been sobbing. He felt her cheeks, which were moist with tears.

“You can tell me,” he said, his voice gentle.

Suddenly, she sat up and threw her arms around his neck, burying her face into his chest. He assumed she must have heard some of the earlier conversation with Marybeth. Maybe she was worried about their situation . . . like he was. He told her that everything was going to be okay. He told her that she needed to get some sleep. He waited for her to tell him what the problem was. She had never been shy before when it came to talking about her feelings. Far from it, Joe thought.

Finally: “I don't like this place,” she told him, crying.

He didn't tell her that he wasn't real sure he liked it either. Instead, he once again eased her back into her bed.

“Is that all?” he asked.

She paused for an inordinate amount of time. She covered her face with her hands.

“That's all,” she said, meekly.

“We won't be here forever,” he said, aware of the irony of that statement.

He rubbed her shoulder until he thought she had drifted back to sleep. He rose eventually and quietly walked across the room toward the hall.

“I love you and Mom,” she said. “I love our whole family.”

He turned at the door.

“Your whole family loves you, too, Sheridan. Now get some sleep.”

Joe rode hard,
pushing Lizzie as fast as he dared, and made it to the elk camp by midday. It was cold. Gray, scudding clouds filled a sky that seemed especially close. He dismounted in the camp, stretched, and unsaddled his horse. They had both worked up a sweat. Steam rose like contrails from Lizzie's back, and he rubbed her down with his gloved hands while she drank from the trickle of cold water that was Crazy Woman Creek in early fall. He set out some grain for Lizzie and then draped the smoky, wet saddle blanket over a branch. He would wait for Lizzie to dry and rest before he continued on.

Except for a few early rising hunters waiting for their coffee to brew in the campground before sunrise, Joe had not seen another living person since seven that morning. On his hard ride up the mountain, he had spooked a small herd of cow and calf elk and had nearly ridden on top of a coyote who was loping lazily down the same trail he was riding up.

As Lizzie rested, he carried his saddle and walked through the elk camp. He sat on a rock, pulled his Thermos from a saddlebag, and poured a cup of coffee. In addition to the new Smith & Wesson revolver he wore on his hip, he had brought his Remington shotgun loaded with double-ought buckshot. He arranged the saddle scabbard on top of the pommel so he could pull the shotgun out quickly.

Even though it was the same place he, Wacey, and McLanahan had moved in on that morning just two weeks before, it seemed very different now. The tents were gone, as were the stoves and wooden floors. The earth within the camp had been trampled flat and hard by investigators. The fireplace had been kicked apart, and the cross beams in the trees that were used for hanging elk had been dismantled. In a year or two, with plenty of snow and new grass and erosion, the elk camp would be unrecognizable, nothing more than a wide, flat place along the stream.

He spread a topographical map across his knees and studied it until he found the location of the elk camp where he now was and the creek that ran alongside it. Along the creek a few inches up from the camp, the contour lines narrowed and became dark and thick, indicating a steep and narrow canyon. The creek became a hairline. The trail, marked by dots and dashes, ended at the mouth of the canyon.

On the map, the canyon looked incredibly long and narrow. He traced it with his finger as it snaked through the heart of the mountain. But what Joe was most interested in was where the creek began, and where the walls appeared to widen. It looked like a huge bowl or depression, two miles long by three miles, all four sides rimmed by sharp cliffs. The area was in a roadless section, and the map showed virtually no access from above. The only way in, it seemed, was upstream along the creek.

Joe had never been to the bowl before. He had asked Vern about it, back when he had just started in the district, because it was such a unique topographical feature. Vern had said he had been there once but hadn't been back as it was so hard to get to. Hunters avoided it, Vern said, because, although it was remote and probably rich with game, it was one of those places where “the only way to get an elk out was with a knife and fork.”

But Ote Keeley, Kyle Lensegrav, and Calvin Mendes had spent a lot of time up here scouting and hunting elk. Joe wouldn't be a bit surprised if they had felt the urge to find out what was upstream, beyond the narrow canyon. They had probably used the same topo map Joe had and could see, as he could, that the bowl could very likely be the home of magnificent elk that were rarely, if ever, hunted.

Joe looked up and searched upstream for the spot where the canyon walls began to narrow. That was where he planned to go.

“Why do you
want to go back to the house so badly, Sheridan?” her mom asked as she gathered up the breakfast dishes from the table. Lucy had already left to go watch television. Lucy had fallen in love with all of the channels available on the satellite dish.

Sheridan had thought long and hard about a story that would work. She had forgotten her library books, she said. The books were due on Monday, she said. It was a lie, Sheridan knew. But it was sort of a good lie.

“Can't we go tomorrow?” her mom asked. “Tomorrow is Sunday.”

“I've got to read the books,” Sheridan said, looking to her grandmother for sympathy. “I've got to do a book report on one of them.”

Missy Vankeuren laughed. She had been in a good mood ever since they had come to the house at the Eagle Mountain Club. “She sounds like me in my school days.”

“Yes,” her mom said, looking with disapproval at her own mother. “But it doesn't sound like Sheridan.”

Mom turned back to her.

“Sheridan, you know better than to wait until the last minute to do your homework,” her mom admonished as she took the dishes to the kitchen.

“Well, it's been pretty busy lately,” Sheridan said, indicating the move. That would instill a little guilt, Sheridan thought. Her mom knew Sheridan didn't really like the new “vacation home,” as Missy called it.

“Just use your charm to get yourself out of it,” Missy said, winking at Sheridan. “Bat your eyes and make up some good story. That's what I would do.” Then she smiled.

Sheridan's mom came back into the dining room.

“Well?” Sheridan asked her. “Can we go get my books?” Persistence usually paid off.

“We'll see.” Her mom looked at her sternly.

“Does that mean yes?” Sheridan asked.

“It means, we'll see,” her mom answered. “Now, scoot. You look like you could use a little nap.”

“I'm okay.”

“Are you feeling all right, honey? You're looking a little pale.”

“I'm okay,” Sheridan repeated, hopping down from the chair.

“She's fine,” Missy told her mom with a knowing smile.

Boy,
Sheridan thought,
is
she
ever wrong.

 

Which meant yes,
Sheridan thought, as she huddled with Lucy under a blanket on the sofa to watch Saturday morning cartoons. A second “we'll see”
always
meant yes.

Despite what she had told her mom, Sheridan wasn't feeling good. She stared blankly at the television set. She had not eaten much breakfast and her stomach hurt. Last night had been the worst night yet. In the unfamiliar bed it was almost as if that man was in it with her, he seemed so close. She could almost smell his breath. It was as if he were there watching her, waiting for her to say or do something she wasn't supposed to. Then that smile of his would turn into something else, something wicked, and in her imagination she could see him turn on his heel to hurt her family. And there was nothing she could do to stop him.

She had awful dreams. The dreams awakened her, and she had trouble getting back to sleep. In one dream, the worst, the man was in her room sitting on a chair near the foot of her bed. He was talking to her, telling her that he was her friend, but in his lap there was something round and large and wrapped in paper. Only this time, when she looked at the object, it was not the head of a kitten. It looked like Lucy's head. In the dream he began to unwrap it.

Another dream had her back in the barn, pinned again to the stall by the man as he breathed in her face and talked to her. He would do things to her mother, he had said. That he'd do things to the baby that was coming, too.
You don't really want another brother or sister around here anyway, do you?
he asked.
I can tell,
he said.
You would like it if it were only you, wouldn't you?
It made her feel bad that in the dream she had nodded her head yes. She hoped she didn't really feel that way. To prove it, she hugged Lucy, but Lucy wriggled free.

Sheridan had stayed awake after her dad had left her room, and had listened as he made coffee and shuffled around the house, gathering things to take with him. She had come close to telling him about the man and her secret pets when he was in her room. She had come
so
close. But remnants from her dreams had stopped her at the last second. After her dad had left the house, she stared at the unfamiliar ceiling and made a couple of decisions. When she made them, they felt right to her. So she wouldn't forget them in the morning, she got out of bed and wrote them down on a piece of paper with a crayon. The crumpled paper was in her pajama pocket now.

First, she would figure out a way to get back to the house so she could make sure the creatures were still there. She would feed them if she could. She prayed they would be all right.

Second, she would tell her dad everything. Something about the way he had put his hand on her face the night before made her feel that if anyone could protect her and the family, it was her dad.

Knowing what she planned to do made her feel a little better. Lucy leaned back against her, and they snuggled under the blanket. Lucy laughed at something that happened in the cartoon. Sheridan let her eyes close. Her eyes were burning. This was too much for her. All of it.

She would have to wait for her dad to come home. Then she would talk. It was time.

The first half
mile of the canyon was easy going, even as the dark gray walls became sheer and the sky became no more than a ribbon of blue light straight overhead. There were Indian petroglyphs on the rocks, scenes of elk bristling with arrows, painted and feathered men on horseback, figures of warriors holding aloft the scalps and entire heads of other warriors. Near the petroglyphs, Joe found newer and much more stupid graphics written with a felt-tipped marker. “Ote Keeley Sucks the Big One,” someone had scratched. “Kyle Eats Shit,” said another. “Calvin Is a Needle Dick.” Yup, Joe thought, the outfitters had come up here all right.

The rock walls eventually became so narrow that Joe dismounted and hung the stirrups over the saddle horn so they wouldn't catch on the sides. Lizzie was fidgety, her ears were pinned back, and her eyes were wide with apprehension. He led her, coaxing her to continue and keeping up a singsong, inane monologue to calm her as the walls closed in around them. He stepped from stone to stone in the stream, trying to keep his boots dry. The mare's metal shoes clattered and sometimes slipped on the creek rocks, and the back of Joe's pants were soon soaked as a result.

He wished he hadn't brought the horse into the canyon and instead had tied her up and continued by himself. The canyon was much narrower than he had anticipated, and the roots, foliage, and thick spiderwebs that covered it made it claustrophobic. The problem he had now was that they had gone too far to turn around. He would have to back her out nearly a quarter of a mile along slippery rocks. The likelihood that she would fall and injure herself—as well as block the canyon—was too great. He had to continue on and hope she would trust him.

At one point when the walls became so narrow that they were literally touching both sides of her and the brush in the canyon was so thick above them as to block out the light, Lizzie finally balked and jerked back on the halter rope, pulling Joe into the creek. Her eyes were white and wild with panic, and they partially rolled back into her head. Joe tried to stop her as she backed up, and the rope sang through his hands, scorching his gloves. She finally stopped when her shoes skated over the tops of the rocks, and she sat down with an enormous thud and splash. Her breath pistoned out of her flared nostrils. She sat quivering and let Joe approach her. He spoke softly to her saying much the same things he had told Sheridan the night before. After a long ten minutes, she awkwardly scrambled upright. Her breathing had settled to a rhythm. He wedged in beside her and could find no injuries on her except for on her flank, where a small flap of torn hide stuck out like a pink tongue. He was now wet everywhere, and getting cold. The buckskin was wet also, and the canyon smelled strongly of horse.